Medical Presentations: Conversation with Terry Irwin

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  Terry Irwin is a retired consultant surgeon based in the UK. He has been an honorary lecturer at Queens University, Belfast for over 20 years. He has been an external examiner for medical schools both in the UK and overseas. He has held a variety of lead roles for the Royal College of Surgeons of England and has been a leader in postgraduate surgical education in Northern Ireland for most of his career. He has published over 50 peer reviewed scientific articles. He has been teaching presentation skills both locally and in a number of countries for 20 years.

In this conversation, Terry talks about his new book, Medical Presentations.

Geetesh: Terry, what inspired you to write Medical Presentations? Was there a specific a-ha moment that made you realize the need for such a guide?

Terry: I teach presentation skills to students, doctors and nurses, running several courses each year. We see the same issues with participants’ slides on every course.

Most people have endured great speakers presenting poorly because they use slide after slide of lengthy text, blurry images, or overly complex visuals.

One of the most annoying issues is that some presentations don’t seem to have a logical flow and a clear take home message.

We have devoted the first two chapters of the book to the educational theory behind good slide design. These are not heavy chapters to read, but essential if readers are going to understand why bad slide design makes a presentation less impactful.

As Professor Trish Greenhalgh says in her foreword “this book is about influence, not just information transfer or learning”.

In other words, every presenter wants the audience to do something. That may be treating patients in a better way, winning increased funding, persuading a tutor that you (a student or trainee) know your subject well, or it may be obtaining a research grant.

Since the same issues come up on every course, it seemed logical to try to encapsulate best practice and the solutions to common faults in the form of a book. Each chapter sits alone, taking the reader through a particular aspect of slide preparation.

While I have a good understanding of the common issues, Julie Terberg and Echo Swinford are the real PowerPoint wizards, and their input elevated the book to a different plane.

Geetesh: Many clinicians and researchers present dense data. What are your top tips for making complex medical content digestible for varied audiences?

Terry: LOL! The best advice that I can give is to buy our book! The issues with scientific presentations are not unique to medicine, so I am sure others will find the book invaluable. I have picked out a few of the most common issues that we deal with:

Plan your presentation on paper before you start. Many professionals use Post It Notes for this. This is a great way to keep focussed and on-message. Be sure that the complexity of the content meets the needs of the audience. Inexperienced learners can be quickly turned off by setting the bar too high.

Keep as much text off your slides as possible. A good slide deck is not a script to be read out. As you add each slide, ask yourself, “am I adding this text for the audience, or is it to remind me what to say?”

Good quality images are essential, and we devote one chapter to how to find great images and another to how to use them effectively. There are some medicine specific image sources that are worth looking at.

Only one message per slide. Ideally that message should be grasped with a brief glance at the slide, so that the audience can focus on what is being said. Often slides just need to be split into several slides — or omitted altogether.

Geetesh: What key advice would you offer to early-career medical professionals who are just beginning to build confidence in presenting their work publicly?

Terry: Get help but choose who helps you carefully. Find someone who already gives engaging presentations and buy them a coffee. Pick their brains. How do they plan their slide decks? Where do they find images? Ask them to critique your slides.

Go on a course. These can be delivered in-person or on-line. You will be amazed how much this will change how you think about presentations.

Effective learning requires constructive feedback, so be sure to ask for this after you present. It’s important that this feedback is honest – just being told you were great is not helpful. What part of your presentation didn’t work so well? Why, and how might you improve it?

Practice, practice, practice. Get a friend or family member to sit through your presentation. Ask them to time it, to check that it flows logically and to look for fillers – words like “OK” or “Em”. These can be very distracting.

Geetesh: The book is co-authored with design experts Julie Terberg and Echo Swinford. How did your collaboration work, and what unique strengths did each of you bring to the table?

Terry: I wrote a book with Julie 20 years ago, and we have kept in touch ever since. Julie has a unique ability to suggest simple but effective improvements in slide design. If your subscibers aren’t familiar with her work, they should look at the Slide a Day project.

No-one (maybe not even some the guys at Microsoft), knows the workings of PowerPoint better than Echo. She is also an extremely logical person, so she helped me reshape much of my draft content, so that it better met the needs of our target audience.

This was a transatlantic collaboration (I am in the UK and Julie and Echo in the US). We worked together using regular Zoom chats. I would draft a chapter, which Echo would help redraft, while also correcting any of my misconceptions about how PowerPoint worked! Julie gave invaluable advice and created the stunning visuals and example slides.

Julie and Echo both use PCs while I am a Mac user, so we have covered both operating systems in the book.

Anyone who is involved in the presentation world will know that Julie and Echo are simply the very best in their field. They have both been Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) for many years. They have co-authored the definitive book on PowerPoint Templates. Julie is a founding director, and the Art Director Emerita and Echo is a founding member and President Emerita of the Presentation Guild.

Geetesh: Can you give our readers an idea of what the book covers?

Terry: The easiest way to do this is by showing the index. As you can see, every aspect of PowerPoint is covered, but each chapter is short enough to read in about 20 to 30 minutes.

Foreword by Prof Trish Greenhalgh (Wikipedia page)

Foreword by Dame Parveen Kumar (Wikipedia page)

Who is this book for?

Planning and preparation

1. Cognitive load
2. Planning you presentation
3. Starting and finishing with impact
4. Where to find great images

Constructing your presentation

5. An introduction to the PowerPoint interface
6. Adding shapes, lines, and text
7. Inserting and editing icons and images
8. Inserting logos and crests
9. Alignment and grouping objects on your slides
10. Animations and transitions
11. Inserting video
12. Saving your presentation
13. Choosing fonts
14. Templates

Showing data

15. Creating tables and charts
16. Effective data visualisation

Presenting

17. Teaching on-line
18. Present like the pros
19. Recording a presentation
20. Creating useful handouts
21. Posters and visual abstracts

Geetesh: Who is the book aimed at? Is it only doctors?

Terry: Absolutely not.Whilst the principal target is healthcare workers (nurses, physiotherapists, radiographers, managers, social workers …. the list is endless), the learning is applicable to anyone who wants to improve their presentations, particularly but not exclusively, those in scientific fields.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.